<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr">Dear Colleagues: <br><br><div>Please consider submitting an abstract for the following panel I am organizing. Apologies for cross-posting, and feel free to distribute widely.<br><br></div><div>Kind regards,<div><br></div><div>Jessica</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>--- <br><br>American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting 2017<br>Washington, D.C.<br>Nov. 29 – Dec. 3, 2017<br><br><br><b>Session</b> <b>Title</b>: Beyond the Human, Beyond the Subfield: Integrating Linguistic and Environmental Anthropology<br><br><b>Organizers</b>:<br>Jessica Pouchet Joshua Shapero<br>Northwestern University University of Michigan<br><a href="mailto:jpouchet@u.northwestern.edu" target="_blank">jpouchet@u.northwestern.edu</a> <a href="mailto:shaperoj@umich.edu" target="_blank">shaperoj@umich.edu</a><br><br><b>Discussant</b>: TBD<br><br><b>Abstract</b>:<br>In recent years, linguistic anthropology has expanded its object of inquiry to increasingly encompass not only human language, but semiosis more broadly, while environmental anthropologists incorporate recent insights on processes of meaning-making to deepen their interrogation of how people relate to their environments relate. Accordingly, anthropologists who work at the intersection of linguistic and environmental anthropology are generating theoretical innovations to advance debates on topics important to both subfields. These topics include questions of value, governance, marginality, ontology, materiality, indigeneity, mapping and place-making, toxicity, and multi-species living. Such scholars, while few but growing in number, engage with semiotic theory, political ecology, spatial-temporal politics, and linguistic diversity and change to propose new approaches to long-standing and emergent questions. They attend to the ethnographic detail of observable conversations, the acoustics of non-human encounters, and the material conditions of physical landscapes, while also considering in their analyses the broader contextualizing patterns of climate change, neoliberal environmentalism, colonialism, and natural resource extraction. The purpose of this panel is to therefore explore the scholarship of environmental and linguistic anthropologists who are finding ways to productively merge the two subfields. Through theoretical innovation and ethnographic illustration, the papers in this panel consider the methodological, theoretical, and analytical areas of overlap between the subfields, and how both senior and emerging scholars bridge them to invent new, and firmly anthropological, approaches to pressing questions within and beyond the discipline.<br><br>We invite authors to submit abstracts addressing the these topics and others, in hopes of illustrating the broad potential for productive conversations between linguistic and environmental anthropologists. The panel may consider such questions as:<br><ul><li>What new lines of inquiry are emerging in linguistic and environmental anthropology from multi-species ethnographies?</li></ul><ul><li>How can innovations in language materiality contribute to and further draw from environmental anthropologists’ work on the relationship between humans and their ecological surroundings? And how can considerations of the living, ecological aspects of material forms enrich linguistic anthropologists' theorizations of materiality? </li></ul><ul><li>What insights are ethnographies that encompass activity social media yielding on processes of place-making and claims to natural resources? And, conversely, how do the extractive industries that enable digital life make new types of communication possible?</li></ul><ul><li>How do processes of language shift and revitalization inform changes in how people linguistically encode environmental features, and with what effect on natural resource use and access?</li></ul>If you are interested in presenting a paper on this panel, please send your abstract to the organizers, <b>Jessica</b> <b>Pouchet</b> at <b>jpouchet@u</b>.<b><a href="http://northwestern.edu" target="_blank">northwestern.edu</a></b> and <b>Joshua Shapero at <a href="mailto:shaperoj@umich.edu" target="_blank">shaperoj@umich.edu</a></b>, by <b>March</b> <b>22</b>, 2017 for consideration. Questions and expressions of interest are welcome earlier.<br><br> --<br>Jessica Pouchet<br>Ph.D. Candidate<br>Department of Anthropology<br>Northwestern University<br><a href="mailto:jpouchet@u.northwestern.edu" target="_blank">jpouchet@u.northwestern.edu</a><br><br></div></div></div>
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